In many contexts, an enterprise or other stakeholder may be required and/or may desire to keep track of and/or exercise control over network or other communications, e.g., communications among employees of a corporation and/or between such employees and third parties, such as the corporation's customers and/or members of the general public. The requirements of the Securities and Exchange commission, National Association of Securities Dealers, HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, and various anti-harassment and anti-discrimination laws are among the many legal and regulatory requirements that may give rise to a need on the part of a corporation or other entity to be able to monitor, record, archive, index, retrieve, analyze, and/or control employee (or other user) communications.
The task of monitoring and controlling communications is made more challenging by the proliferation in recent years of new communication technologies, such as e-mail, chat, instant messaging, and short message service (SMS) technology (the basic text character form of which is sometimes referred to as “text messaging”, e.g., via a mobile phone or other mobile device, and technologies related to SMS such as Enhanced Message Service (EMS) and Multimedia Message Service (MMS), which enable longer messages and rich, multimedia content such as video to be sent. Some modern communication technologies involve the use of mobile communication devices and/or infrastructure beyond the control of the responsible entity, further complicating the task of monitoring and controlling user communications.
Therefore, there is a need for an effective way to monitor and/or control communications, including without limitation communications made using mobile and/or data messaging technology.